THE ANCIENT WORLD. CHAPTER I. PREFATORY REMARKS. A REVIEW of the history of the earlier ages will probably not be unacceptable to the readers of the present day. The subject is an interesting one, and can never cease to be instructive. We are all more or less anxious to know who those ancient nations were who lived and flourished when Europe was covered with forests and sprinkled over with savages; how they were connected with each other; in what characteristic peculiarities they agreed, and in what they differed; what were their several pursuits, and what their respective and relative attainments. As yet our inquiries on these points have certainly not been exhausted. We still wish to ascend the stream of history a little further, to observe, if possible, the different stages of ancient development, with which the development of subsequent ages is so intimately allied. The different parts of the universe are mutually and very familiarly connected with each other. The Chinese, the Hindus, the Persians, the Assyrians, and the Egyptians, did not exist for nothing; and the Greeks and Romans only carried to greater perfection that knowledge which they derived from their predecessors. The germs of the intellect we admire in Greece and Rome existed from a prior date. Plato says that his countrymen derived all their knowledge from the ancients, who "were wiser, and lived nearer to the gods, than we." How did those wiser nations originate? How did they VOL. I. B gradually unfold themselves? What was their first simple state of existence? How did more complex relations arise? These are questions which ought to repay every exertion made to elucidate them. The difficulties which surround the subject are admittedly great. The primitive annals of all nations are necessarily based on traditions; and these traditions, originally uncertain, have, in the course of ages, become much more so, having, on the one hand, been mutilated by time, and, on the other, embellished or disfigured by poets and rhetoricians. Of the oldest times we possess fragments only: some in the shape of verses, others in that of uncertain. genealogies of kings. Of some nations there have been no records of any kind whatever; of others a great part of such records as did exist has been lost or destroyed. Of all nations the written accounts that survive were thrown into that form long after the age of the events recorded, and must presumably, to a great extent, be spurious. Absolute accuracy and completeness of result cannot therefore well be hoped for from any investigation conducted under such circumstances where the premises are so imperfect and uncertain, the conclusions built upon them can never be wholly perfect and accurate. It is the fashion to assert that an inquiry where everything is so vague and doubtful must be utterly useless. It appears to us that it is precisely such an inquiry (carried on under disadvantages of a character so peculiar, and every scintillation of light thrown over which is a gain to knowledge and humanity) that is of real benefit to mankind; and that even our very conjectures and inferences in connection with it, where legitimately derived from the traditions reviewed, are absolutely of greater value than repetitions of veritable accounts of modern wars and achievements with which we are constantly inundated. The series of information for all the past may not admit of being completed; we cannot expect to be able to lay before the world the annals of the primitive ages in their integrity. But the main features of their history can still be rendered clear enough for all useful pur |